alisson

I heard watering the leaves is a technique to avoid frost damage in some regions

I've been doing syntropic agriculture for over 7 years now. Ernst is no doubt a great teacher! But I would be careful with claiming it has better yields, it really depends on how you are measuring it, you might get better yields per plant, but not per square meter if counting only 1 crop, but since you have multiple crops in the same space (separated by time) the yields are better in general.

Its beautiful to see a coffee plantation where the trees got pruned right before the coffee flowers, that makes the best harvest per plant no doubt.

The best bigger scale syntropic system I know so far is Mata do Lobo https://instagram.com/matadolobo they are really mechanizing a lot of those processes are really digging into the soil ecosystem, its worth checking them out.

I know a few people that make very good money applying permaculture principles. Not because they are applying the principles, but because they are very good at selling their produce and services. They know how to get to their target audience, specially people with more money to spend. I think this is true for any kind of agriculture or business.

- The richest man is not he who has the most, but he who needs the least.

- When you try to replicate someone's life, you don't live yours.

They are very similar actually, but permaculture is about more than just agriculture, agriculture is one of the sides of permaculture. For me syntropic agriculture is that side, some people also call it agroforestry but this term is used for other kinds of agriculture, which builds forests but differently. On syntropic the main difference is very high density of plants and extensively pruning. The video I posted in the first comment you see a few people doing research on automating this processes, there's also some people Swiss investing into this, sure with less biodiverse but its being working great for them, so yes, can be automated, also lots of machines used on fruits crops can be used on this system, specially to speed up pruning bigger trees. And usually on syntropic its not common to find "key" shapes beds and stuff that we see from permaculture, its usually straight rows, which helps a lot with automation I guess.

For sure, will be a pleasure, you can find me at alissonpatricio at gmail

I don't know what to recommend you. I know a few people doing syntropic agriculture in Portugal which is as close as a close climate that I know. There is a guy in Florida, he have a company called GreenDreamsFL, hes the only one I know in the US doing this. But sadly this is not very much taught in academic courses down here in Brazil, but anything related to agroecology is very close, also understanding deeply plants biology helps A LOT when working with this systems, so we see a lot of people from Biology with a focus on Botany and Plant's physiology, and "florest engineering" I couldn't find a good translation to it, but its an academic course found here in Brazil which also helps a lot on understanding forests processes.

Just do it, start getting your hands dirty as other said. I personally started with composting and now I have a system where my food waste becomes forests, I eat lots of vegetable/fruits and I just throw the bucket on a specific place, cover with mulch and food grows. Avocado, papayas, limes, cucumber, tomatos, lots of them grow easily here just by doing this.

If you look for "agroforest academy" in youtube you may find a video course in english on this syntropic agriculture topic too.

I had a small reserve, and I cut my living costs a lot. I wasn't trying to make money from agriculture in the beginning, was all about learning, I volunteered a lot and did a few courses later. This year we started actually selling produces and I get lots of calls to pruning jobs which I do decline because 2 years down this line I started working with development again because I got out of money. We would be able to live from the land today for sure, but also having economic security and being able to invest in better tools and such is also very good.

I'm now looking to merge this two worlds and work as a developer on solutions for agriculture/forests. I have a product in mind which I'm currently working on, lets see :)

Yes exactly! Its what happens naturally, trees dies, falls, takes others with them with the fall, make space for newer trees and wood decompose... Natural succession.

If you don't have woody material, just leafs works too, the key is organic matter build up and photosynthesis. So we tend to cut weeds (when they start to mature/flower usually) very cleanly for them to grow bigger and better, not killing them, focus is to build soil for more demanding plants.

Yes, the method applies anywhere in the planet. But for that you need to deeply understand the plants available for you, I mean those that are able to grow there in the beginning, native or not, here we use lots of african grasses and eucalyptus to start. There are a few people replicating this all over the world in very different environments.

Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because:

- You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests

So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy" or grasses... Harvest this small plants for many years, after a few years you harvest fruits, and after 2 decades you harvest the wood and start over. All with extensive pruning.

This way you end up with better soil each time without machines or fertilizers (sure you can speed even more the process with them), its a type of agriculture focused on nature's processes instead of inputs.

There's an interesting video about it showing some big farmers here trying to build machines better adapted to this kind of agriculture, this is the biggest bottleneck to scale because right now most machines are very focused on monocultures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

I think for agriculture the way to go is syntropic agriculture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE I've seen people implementing this very successfully, I've been doing it myself for around 4 years now, and its very impressive how much carbon the soil stores after a few years on this practice.

syntropic agriculture, that's what I'm involved right now and that's where I found this balance

Some trees takes years to fully decompose, even in contact with the soy, even on tropical climate. I say because I practice a kind of agriculture where we plant trees to feed to soil, we prune/cut the trees to cover the soil 4 times a year, the soil keeps increasing in organic matter (becoming darker and darker each year) and I notice some especies are very good at not decomposing, usually this are trees used for civil construction, which is another way of storing the CO2 I think. For me cutting trees down is not the problem, the real problem is not planting more... also where that energy of the tree ends up, burning wood I think is a waste.

If I walk on snow, do I experience walking, or do I just walk? What is experience?

If we explain experience in a way that its reactions happening in my body, maybe biochemical reactions, that could even translate into thoughts in my head, I could say that in a lower level the snow also experience reactions, physical reactions. A snowflake don't have a body to experience like we do, but it does experience something, because if not, it would not even deform.

Why forest can't be farms? They should not be opposite but complement each other.

Sometimes I say as joke that in reality the universe are not expanding but the things inside that are shrinking.

For industrialized I mean canned, over packaged, processed and refined stuff, also produces from vary far away on our daily diet, not against it but we do over consume this stuff. (Obs: thats what I see around me)

But also, mono-crops are another issue which comes from industrialization too. I'm not against machines and robots, but we are still figuring out a way of working with this stuff together with forests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

Here farms acreage is increasing, more mono-crops and less forests, all with the help of industrialization, crops from other side of the world and endemic fruits, nuts disappearing and because of that loosing habitats.

At least eucalyptus is winning, even though native wood is better in so many ways, but the iron industry here don't buy the charcoal if not from mono-crops of eucalyptus.

I think the biggest villain to healthy and environment is not animal products, but the industrialization of food.

The natural habitat of Cocoa tree as usually bellow other trees, like many other species, Coffee too, it likes to be a little shaded by others, and the main thing about this method shown in the videos is very regular pruning and by organizing the organic matter in the ground the nutrients gets available for other species as well as more sunlight, so making very good use of the ecological succession - soil gets better and better naturally with nature processes - which is something very well known and studied in Botany but very little applied to agriculture, this is the gap this farmer is filling. As shown a little in the video, when he's going to grow something very sun hungry like lettuce or corn he does that by opening a big area in the forest and together with the lettuce he introduces seeds of other trees for the next natural succession.

I don't have an actual verified study to show you :/ But I believe there are a bunch of studies, as I have seeing a few universities making them, but I don't know how to find them. All I have now is my own experience on this topic.

There's a great method called Agroforestry that uses forest floors to produce more food:

Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now.

Big producers joining to make it more scalable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

A good resume from Nutrition Facts with a few other related papers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e9sLsCowaE

The Radical Mycology book is the book for me: https://radicalmycology.com/ Also Paul Stamets's shop have a lot of resources: http://www.fungi.com

I completely agree with you, but as someone as have gone multiple times for 10-day courses what I like best about that is the organization/community as a whole, I learned a lot from serving maybe even more then just sitting actually my first glimpse of Jhana was while serving, you also have access to a very experienced teacher to talk and ask questions, and that its all free and the food is excellent, so really helps a lot. If you are able to do a course by yourself I have no doubt it can be a much deeper dive into reality.

Something that is in the core teachings of Vipassana for me is that everything is just a matter of perspective, there is that no-judging perspective where you find equanimity everywhere.

I used to eat banana flowers lol its not difficult to find in the market here. Its interesting because the bananas we eat don't develop seeds and the flowers are downwards and the species that does develop seeds the flower is upwards (like musa velutina) its like the common bananas are not "strong" enough, so don't even bare seeds.

I think its a result of a good management of the forest. What if instead of cutting the trees we manage them to get a better forest? Like pruning and laying the wood in the soil to decompose faster and better, we can increase the speed of ecological succession a lot. What if for every hard good wood we cut we plant more so we can have even more later?

I've being learning and practicing this type of agriculture for 3 years, its incredible how the soil can improve without adding things from outside, like fertilizers, just seeds: http://vimeo.com/159262175

Also by eating raw fruits, the food we should eat the most, we act as a very powerful seed dispersal, where you through your food there is big chance for the seeds to germinate, its a mistake to get every trash together and treat them the same, by spreading rests of fruits and vegetables and just covering them with enough dried leaves to stop the smell you will plant easily thousands of trees every year with little effort.

Stevia is not artificial, its an extract from a plant like sugar is from cane or sweet potato. I think its always a good idea to don't encourage people to eat processed stuff, even fructose can have bad side effects, but when eaten the whole plant its not bad, the body process sucrose differently when eating a cane for example.

We should be focusing into building soil and edible forest to harvest multiple floors instead of just that usual monoculture one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE If we look closely forest's soil usually gets better and better, I see some people replicate this and seen some 'agroforest' with more then 5 years old and its stunning how productive there lands are, how diverse and how the soil just get better without adding external stuff like fertilizer, its a process type of agriculture instead of an input one.

I prefer the 'savasana' position, I actually find it more confortable without a pillow in this position, I can also be by the sides or any other position, just not for all night long, I found it actually decreased upper back and neck pains after I removed the pillow